Having used mint gnome editions on the desktop computer happily for years (since Bianca), I'm very inexperienced in KDE.

I bought an Asus S200E Vivobook for my wife for Christmas and soon got fed up with windows 8. We've tried ubuntu 11.10 with the unity interface, which quite suits the little netbook but I'm keen to get the KDE plasma netbook interface working. Mint14 KDE edition at least recognises the Atmel touchscreen (more than openSuse does) and in the dektop modes works as expected (tap the icon to open/launch). HOWEVER in the 'netbook' mode it responds to the touchscreen only by showing a 'tool-tip' double tapping makes no difference. Only way to launch is to resort to the touchpad.

Is there a setting that I've missed somewhere to change the response to the touchscreen?

The notebook was a Christmas present for the wife. Neither of us could get along with Windows 8 because all the programs we wanted to use (Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office) were only available in the 'desktop' mode which made the touchscreen interface nothing but a nuisance. That and having to sign up for a Microsoft account to do anything. So a can't comment on dual-booting because by the fourth day of Christmas we wiped the disk and installed KDEmint and Ubuntu 12.10 side-by-side. We both liked the latter more so we've given up on KDE mint - it looked promising but simply didn't work properly (see my original post). Perhaps future editions will be better suited? Anyway, I can recommend ubuntu 13.04 beta which is what we are using now.

interesting.. I got the same vivobook and could not get that one getting installed. From the iso it did run, but installing it failed loading properly (mounting error and some more). Any specifics you remember doing?